A system and method for defining a schema and sending a query to a similarity search engine to determine a quantitative assessment of the similarity of attributes between an anchor record and one or more target records. The similarity search engine makes a similarity assessment in a single pass through the target records having multiple relationship characteristics. The similarity search engine is a server configuration that communicates with one or more database management systems for providing data persistence, data retrieval and access to user defined functions. The architecture enables search activities to be segmented among multiple remote database management systems for reducing the time required to perform searches. Implementation provisions include a method by which a secure transport driver may be configured for a datasource and a method by which configuration files may be persisted to either filesystem storage or a relational database.